foodmuseumblog

Let Them Eat Tasty Food

"...Denise Snow, the school cafeteria manager, said that children can be taught to eat better. “When we went to whole-wheat pizza, the kids fussed for a while and we lost some of them,” Ms. Snow said. “But now they don’t say a thing, and pretty much everyone is back to eating them.”"

Ms Snow works for Orange County High School. She gets it. Offer people, even teens--OMG!-- decent food and they will eat it. 

The piece by Gardiner Harris in the NYTimes quoting Ms Snow begins this way:

WASHINGTON — "The Obama administration will begin a drive this week to expel Pepsi, French fries and Snickers bars from the nation’s schools in hopes of reducing the number of children who get fat during their school years." Hubba hubba.

Back in the day, when little American students were not obese, one had to hit the local Mom and Pop store or in my case, Mrs. Neustedt's, to buy a 3 Musketeers bar, or an orange Tru-Ade, with $$ begged  from home. The family larder did not include these items, dare I say. Mrs. N was a tiny dark-haired woman with dirty fingernails who could barely see over her counter, and 8 year-olds figured she was a gypsy, because while we were hemming and hawing over what to buy, she often disappeared behind the dark red velvet drapes behind her, possibly to shake her crystal ball, or rattle her dice.

So now crappy food is almost unavoidable at many schools---I hate to see my beloved potato lumped in with syrupy soft drinks and candy bars, truly, because the potato itself is a powerful, healthy food, ideal for people of any age. No one is supposed to live on fries, 3 x day, people. And one can make fries--we all love them--so that they are not mere vehicles for oil and salt infusions.

That said, reading that Orange County High wheels a candy wagon around the school, as a fund-raising device, casts a chill, indeed. But we have a national defense budget a zillion times larger than that of any other country, and, no surprise, schools sell candy to supply student basic school things.

Hey-- no health care for the citizens of the US!  Way, way, WAAAY  too costly, of course. And  those people  rolling into hospitals with diabetes ?? Gosh and golly--what to do?

Flogging Fish from the Curb

What is it with Marines and Yale grads? On encountering this category of persons, in my experience within minutes one learns either that Semper Fi reigns, or that an individual “went to school in New Haven.”

OK, fine. The guy who sold me 14 pieces of freeze-packed ahi tuna caught in Indonesian waters from his little pickup truck, right on the street outside my house, the Semper Fi guy, is forgiven. The tuna is superlative. And the ex-Marine is a hard-working flogger of frozen meat and fish, a facile talker with charm.

Right up until he said I reminded him of his mother. Surely he was too old to have a Mom my age... But I digress—perhaps this is the wave of the economically-challenging future. Guys, and gals, selling goods from their trucks, launching websites, sticking business cards in our doors, quoting their mothers, tossing in their Semper Fi-ness. Alluding to their Yale-ness. Whatever.

Bread—a decent multi-grain baguette, warm from the oven, leaning up against my door in the mornings, every day or so? I could go for that.

Half and half from cuddly, healthy, undrugged cows? Once every 2 weeks. Yep. Add it to my order.

Yellow Bag Thoughts--Haiti

The cover of the Feb 8 New Yorker magazine I am reading on a flight from Albuquerque to Tampa, pictures pampered dogs in city outerwear, all leashed, standing unhappily in the snow. Inside the mag, a reporter writes that in Haiti early food aid provided by the Dominican Republic consisted of rations to feed a family for a day---” rice, cornmeal, beans, sardines and Vienna sausages.” The food was contained in yellow plastic bags, most likely similar to those stuffed in pockets by city-dwellers out walking their pets, at the ready to capture the canine droppings none of us likes to step in on sidewalks cleared of snow.